I would see her three times in my life. The first was on a cloudy day in October, the ground littered with fragments of leaves scattered around like golden confetti. At the greyest point of the day, when the sun had decided to burrow deep into the arms of sky, she passed behind me in the bathroom mirror. Scalding water rained down on my fingers, and I had just mustered the energy to cast my heavy lids up into the foggy glass. Like a plume of smoke, her pink hair floated behind my sweater, close enough to scratch my neck as she ghosted along.

I was always told it was rude to stare, but once my eyes reached her they had nowhere else to go. My eyes, like the needle on a broken record, moved forward and backward, side to side, but never quite managed to escape the boundary of her small frame. She was leaning against the sink, wearing clothes so black the dirty ceramic looked more like pearl when she pressed into it, as she swung her backpack around and began to dig. I felt my heart stutter, and then throb, when it hit me how beautiful she was.

It was a little abnormal, how perfect she looked, but then so was everything else about her (as I would later come to find out). Her cotton candy hair dusted sharp shoulders, and glowed against the arm that was busy rummaging around her bag. Her skin was both yellow and pale, but never sallow, impossible as it was under the harsh halo of fluorescent light. Instead, it reminded me of cream soda or the sugar you stirred on the stove when you want to make syrup. When her eyes, grey as the sunless sky, finally looked up, my body flooded with the ugly heat of jealousy.

Yes, jealousy because she was beautiful, but of something else too. Something much stranger and more difficult to define. Something that twinged, and coiled, and struck when her lips wrapped around the cigarette that she drew from her bag. There was a faint envy, suddenly, of the many people who had gotten to hold her, and how none of them were me. How none of them could be me. When I thought of this feeling, and of what was just out of reach — the things I was never allowed to want — my body turned cold.

Even when she offered me a smokey drag of her cigarette, and its bitter ashes stung my tongue, I was cold. Even — no, especially — when her shoulder pressed into mine each time she leaned in, her fingers searching for the joint, I was cold. And when she laughed, that pretty, spirited echo that bounced across the tiled walls, I was freezing.

After a nebulous amount of time had passed, and she was getting up to pack her things to leave, I thought, sadly, of how we were ships in the night. How she was passing, I was passing, off to our own separate directions, sailing beneath the soot black sky, out and away from the brief pocket of company we had found in each other. Maybe we’re more like trains, I thought bitterly, the ripping sound of her backpack zipper cutting through the silence, trains that were shooting past each other too fast. Trains that just couldn’t stop, no matter how sadly or desperately the conductor pulled at the lever.

Blame it on the dizzy veil of nicotine, or her rapidly approaching absence, but I decided to pull her into a goodbye hug before we reached the door and crossed the threshold between this moment and our separate destinies. When her long arms held me in place a beat too long, and she pulled back to reveal a shiny, burning grin, I completely abandoned all pretenses of normalcy.

I won ’ t forget you, I thought, pressing a tiny, delicate kiss to her cheek. And like trains in the night, I vanished; shooting off along my individual track back into the unknown.